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18 March 1995

WHAT does an ultra-miniature digital panel meter make you think of? An enormous pair of breasts? This, apparently is what it makes Lascar Electronics think of, since the company’s publicity material for its new DPM3 meter shows the gadget dangling in a woman’s cleavage between her bared nipples.

Lascar is duly nominated for Feedback’s “most stupid, tasteless and sexist promotion of the year” award.

SOMETIMES little things matter the most. The major electronics companies are currently arguing over the technical standard for the new super-CD system they will launch next year. They agree that the new format must be able to store, for example, a whole feature film on a single disc. They also agree that new players must be “backwards-compatible” – that is, able to play today’s CDs as well as the new ones.

They disagree on one basic point. Should the new disc store everything on a single side (as proposed by Philips and Sony) or should it be made from two sides, which are then stuck together with glue (as proposed by Toshiba and Time-Warner)? Curiously, the double-sided approach is winning, with Panasonic now also backing it.

Feedback would like to ask a couple of very simple questions&colon; If the CD is double-sided, where will the makers put the label? And if they solve this problem by putting the disc inside a labelled holder (like those used for some CD-ROM systems), how will they build a backwards-compatible player?

To make a CD player with a slot that takes a disc in a holder, while at the same time being able to take an ordinary CD of the type that drops so neatly into the tray of today’s players, is a nontrivial task.

FORTUNATELY not all science has to be one hundred per cent exact. Sometimes, a rule of thumb will do. Or at least it used to, until Jack Stratton disconcerted the readers of Physics Today last year by writing that the term “rule of thumb” derives from the size of switches with which men were permitted to whip their wives until the beginning of the 19th century. The term, Stratton asserted was offensive and ought not to be used.

In last month’s issue of the magazine, however, three readers take issue with Stratton. Jerry Tobias says he is opposed to beating wives, but he is also opposed to “inventing data to make a point” He goes on to cite eight different dictionaries which fail to confirm Stratton’s claim, from which he infers that it is a myth. “If Stratton insists on being politically correct, let him start by being correct,” he suggests.

More seriously, he argues that in any case words change their meanings, and the idea that each term can only be used with its one, original meaning is both “absurd” and “abhorrent”.

Diego Enciso thinks that Stratton is being oversensitive, whether his claim is correct or not. “As a Mexican-American am I supposed to bristle if someone uses the term ‘bean counters’?” he asks. “People of good will put more importance on intent than on a particular word or phrase.”

And Michael Mazzola suggests that “trivial proscriptions” like the one offered by Stratton only delay the day when serious measures to counter injustices such as violence against women are implemented.

“Nevertheless,” he concludes, “in the future, my rule of thumb will be to avoid rules of thumb.”

EACH year, staff at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, rehearse the kidnapping of their director-general. Not as a plot, you understand, but to identify the problems of policing an international organisation whose site straddles two countries.

Practice makes perfect&colon; but perfection still hadn’t quite been achieved when, a fortnight ago, the whole organisation was held to ransom for two million French francs after some 1200 electronic components that are indispensable to the running of its particle accelerators were removed and hidden.

A CERN technician has since been charged with theft and extortion, and all the components recovered. The director-general, we are happy to say, remained unkidnapped and unharmed.

ALL of Kent seems to be up in arms over the Channel Tunnel rail link, and the village of Southfleet is no exception.

Southfleet is close to the new international station at Ebbsfleet, although somehow the slogan “Ebbsfleet, gateway to Europe” doesn’t quite have the resonance of Peter Sellers’s immortal “Balham, gateway to the south”.

However, we digress. The Southfleet parish council is objecting to a spur off the new rail link. The spur runs along a couple of miles of a disused branch line from Southfleet before joining the main line to London. And who in particular will be affected by this spur? According to The Gravesend Reporter, the council is especially that the “residents of Railway Cottages and Station House will be living very close to the line”.

One can see their point.

But then, they probably also objected when that convenient little railway line and station just by their homes was closed down.

SOME modern hotels offer a video checkout to speed busy travellers on their way. The room TV set displays a copy of the guest’s bill ahead of departure.

Staying in a hotel in the US recently, Feedback switched through the ordinary TV channels and saw that the “Entertainment Channel” was screening an item about holiday travel. Several semi-famous people were asked what items they like to carry with them on holiday. A Hollywood actor said he took a VCR, because he could plug it into the hotel room TV and watch tapes rented from a local video library. “I am sure it is illegal” he admitted, “but you get a wider choice than the hotel’s pay-per-view movie menu.”

He went on to say that by chance he had found that if he plugged the hotel’s video lead into his VCR, and then plugged the VCR into the hotel’s TV set, he got to see all their pay movies free. The VCR bypasses the control box which lets films through only to rooms that have paid for them.

And as a bonus, he confided, he also got to see (and even record) all the video checkout signals for all the other rooms.

“So you get to see everybody’s bills, what they have spent in the hotel, where they have phoned, what movies they have watched, and all their personal details … Bear that in mind when you ask for a video checkout,” he suggested.

The way the actor spoke had a horrible ring of truth to it. Until someone with engineering clout explains why his claim is bunkum, Feedback will be playing safe and asking for no more video checkouts.